In this research note the author describes a methodology for doing
literature reviews. The first part of the note describes a method for
designing and performing the study each consisting of five steps.
Following this framework a typology of strategies is proposed.

An open European market for goods and services, including transport services, stimulates trade, global competitiveness and economic growth. At the same time, concerns about domestic job security and the environment have sparked debate. This report should be considered a first modest contribution to a mainly unexplored area in the past. Cabotagestudien consists of a walkthrough of previous research on road freight transport deregulation, a data collection of the movements of international trucks in Scandinavia, method validation and statistical comparison Parts of the data collection presented in this report are based on an innovative app for truck counting that registers vehicle movements with the assistance of 8 000 volunteers. Given the novelty of the methods employed and the lack of statistics, the results must be interpreted by keeping in mind the underlying assumptions of this report.

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An Organizational Discourse Study of Public Managers’ Struggles with Collaboration across the Daycare Area

Plotnikof, Mie(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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Resume:

This doctoral study explores problematics of managing and organizing collaborative
governance from an organizational discourse perspective. Collaborative governance
is a public management practice developing currently with the aim of engaging
stakeholders to address and co-create potential solutions to complex public problems,
such as policy and service innovation. This is seen as a potential shift between new
public management (NPM) and new public governance (NPG) discourses in the
governance literature. Pursuing collaborative governance in practice is not taken to be
an easy task, as it involves changes from hierarchical organizing towards
interorganizational collaboration in networks and partnerships. The literature
therefore discusses both the potentials and problems, and conceptualizes their issues
in organizational models of design and implementation issues, and new managerial
roles. These issues are approached as managerial challenges and unfolded in terms of
paradoxes, socially dynamic tensions and power relations – especially by one stream
of studies. They stress the need to understand challenges of collaborative governance
practice by approaching the emerging social interactions and power relations;
however, the theorization of communication and discursive aspects to do so is underdeveloped.

Road transport is an important sector, connecting time and space of production and consumption. Its market conditions has changed. The EU single market implementation has increased price pressure due to supply of low cost road freight transport from counties with lower cost structures. Changes in the market also encourage strategic development of some road hauliers into providers of unique services. Such road haulier strategic development contributes to efficiency and effectiveness in basically all business sectors of EU. Little research is available of such strategic and operational management.
In this paper we will explore that knowledge gap and analyze what value proposition(s) and capabilities can transform potential cost disadvantages of acting in a market that includes both high- and low-cost-country actors? And in conceptual terminology, how are capabilities deployed and developed to construct a competitive value proposition?
We will illustrate the strategy-as-practice with two projects, and discuss implications in terms of capabilities needed to create an effective value proposition and hence competitiveness. The theoretical contribution is in theorizing haulier strategic development in which we take into account logistics service supplier strategic management. We also contribute with better understanding of value creation in order to escape commoditization and differentiate services through relationships (customers and/or other hauliers). Practical implications concern hauliers’ strategy creation and to some extent road transport buyers in terms of more informed market knowledge.

Purpose: The effects of supply chain risk management (SCRM) on the performance of a supply chain
remain unexplored. It is assumed that SCRM helps supply chains to cope with vulnerabilities
both proactively by supporting robustness and reactively by supporting agility. Both
dimensions are assumed to have an influence on supply chain performance and on business
performance. This research is aimed at providing clarity by empirically testing these
hypotheses and scrutinizing the findings by the means of case studies.
Design/methodology/approach: The research is empirical. Survey data was collected from 270 manufacturing companies for
hypotheses testing via structural equation modeling. Additionally, qualitative data was
collected to explore the nature of non-hypothesized findings.
Findings: It is found that SCRM is important for agility and robustness of a company. Both agility and
robustness show to be important in improving performance. While agility has a strong
positive effect only on supply chain performance, but not directly on business performance,
robustness has a strong positive effect on both performance dimensions. This important
finding directs the strategic attention from agility-centered supply chains to ones that are both
robust and agile. The case studies provide insights to the fact that robustness can be
considered a basic prerequisite to deal with supplier-side risks, while agility is necessary to
deal with customer-side risks. The amount of agility and robustness needs to fit to the
competitive strategy.
Practical implications: Since volatility has increasingly become a prevalent state of supply chains, companies need
to consider robustness to be of primary importance to withstand everyday risks and
exceptions.
Originality/value: This is the first study to view the relationship between SCRM, agility/robustness, and
performance.

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A closer look on the role of design choices in framing coordination and motivation

Gevoll, Linn(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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Resume:

The motivation of this study was to explore how the design choices created when
developing Performance Management (hereafter PM), produces proposals of how to
coordinate and motivate operational employees in performing their tasks, and to
which extent they are successful in doing so. PM is often postulated as a management
resource in organizing employee contribution to value creation. Here, it is often
suggested that carefully designed PM promotes organizational value creation, by
facilitating the motivation and coordination of employees’ contribution. However, the
way in which design choices function to suggest how to define the boundaries of what
it means to coordinate and motivate employees in practice is less clear.
I therefore set out to study the different design choices made on three central elements
in a new operational Performance Management System (PMS hereafter), to explore
how these design choices propose ideas of how to coordinate and motivate
employees’ value creation in daily operations. My study follow the design choices
made with regard to leading indicators (e.g. performance measures), performance
targets and feedback over a period of three years (2012-2014). I do so, to investigate
how design choices made on these three elements play a significant role in assigning
specific property to what motivation and coordination of operational employees
entails in practice. For example, the study illustrate how the choice to design leading
indicators as key behavioral indicators (KBIs hereafter) propose that coordination of
employees contribution means to point out what they should do when performing key
activities. Detailed accounts such as this, provides rich insight into how design
choices suggest distinctive, meaning to how to coordinate and/or motivate employees
in their daily operations, which produce the boundaries of desired action.

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Keywords Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Design, Literature study
Abstract Argues stability is a design objective for supply chain design alongside cost, lead
time and responsiveness. Performs an extensive literature study on supply chain design,
identifies methods, theories and objectives in the existing literature. Describes the concept
external specificity and how it’s used to design supply chains. Using the concept upstream,
archetypes of risk minimal and maximal design are identified. Downstream the concept
describes two viable scenarios, one minimizing the impact, the other minimizing the
probability of (intended) departure of a supply chain partner. Finally, principles for supply
chain design are described and managerial outlined.

Servitization, or adding services to the manufactured
product, has become a strategy for
increasing financial margins, getting closer to
the customer and prolonging product lives. This
is especially applicable to Western hemisphere
companies in their efforts to compete with companies
from low cost countries and emerging
economies.
It is our hope that this booklet can assist managers
to analyze and plan a servitization strategy.
The text is brief and comprehensive to supplement
a workshop, but can also be used separately
as a quick guide on steps to follow for a manager
when considering servitization for the company.
This booklet is produced to serve as a documentation
of a research project together with industry
on how servitization can be a strategy to enhance
the competitiveness of manufacturing firms.

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“How can we understand the dynamics of procurement management?” An answer to this question has
predominantly been explained by procurement management experiencing dissatisfaction with the
status quo, where the procurement organisation was viewed from other entities in the company as an
insignificant, reactive and an administrative part of the business. The potential, however, for the
procurement organisation to be significant in the company was argued to be vast (Ammer 1989,
Ellram & Carr 1994, Van Weele 2005). In order to change the situation of the procurement
organisation, procurement management was informed that they should in gradual steps develop the
procurement organisation towards more sophistication and significance (Reck & Long 1988)
producing strategies that were aligned with the overall company strategy including the development
of policies, procedures, systems, tools and processes (Cousins 2002, Cousins et al 2008). This process
changed the perspective of the procurement organisation which among other things, allowed the
procurement entity to contribute to the implementation of the concept of supply chain management
(Freeman & Cavinato 1990). Ever since I first got familiar with the practices of procurement and its
management, I have been puzzled by its complexity. At the same time, I have wondered about how
the same space of complexity in the procurement management domain literature has explained the
same practices by reductionism, smoothness and simplicity as just described.

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An Ethnographic Study of an Emerging Business Model Innovation within the Frame of a Manufacturing Company

Michea, Adela(Frederiksberg, 2016)

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Resume:

This is an ethnographic study of business model innovation in an established manufacturing
company. The motivation of the thesis is to propose a sensemaking (Weick, 1995), with focus
on enactment (Weick, 1979), analysis of a business model innovation process, stepping outside
the usual perspectives employed in analysing such a phenomenon, namely activity system,
dynamic capability and transaction costs, discovery driven or cognitive perspective.
The research question guiding the thesis is:
How do established companies enact new business models?
The innovation of business models in established companies is an intricate process, and a
mountain to climb in the eyes of top management. Often, in the choice between innovation and
control the latter wins. Studies have shown that technologies and processes, which have the
potential to challenge the exiting model, are being filtered out. In here, the dominant logic, and
so-called managerial inertia, is defining the selection criteria. However, in face of perceived
serious exogenous factors, such as financial crisis or losing significant market shares, companies
are left with nothing else than the choice of innovating their business model.

This PhD Thesis researches into Strategic Cost Management with a general research interest in,
how top management makes sense about the organization’s cost structure in strategic decisions
about the configuration of the value chain. The empirical setting is among other confined by
organizations’ outsourcing and relocation ventures, where ‘cost reduction’ is a prominent argument
behind the decisions. The overall research purpose is to develop explanatory propositions about,
how Strategic Cost Management practices might be ‘enacted and given meaning’ (Baxter and Chua,
2003, p. 112) by top management.
Such understanding is suggestable of scholarly interest. It is well-known to academia that extant
contributions from the literary realms of Supply Chain Management and Management Accounting
irradiate that decisions to reconfigure the organizations’ value chains can encompass substantial
investments and embed pivotal organizational tradeoffs. Thus, it is of centrality in relation to the
organizations’ competitive positions. Secondly, contemporary contributions within Supply Chain
Management or in close juxtaposition hereto increasingly question decision making schemes based
on ‘pure cost efficiency considerations’ (e.g. Kinkel, 2012, p. 696). These contributions
progressively advocate for a broader view upon organizations’ approaches to value chain
configuration. This perspective on cost management within the realm of the value chain is shared by
Management Accounting researchers (e.g. Anderson, 2007; Anderson and Dekker, 2009ab).
These Management Accounting situated researchers, thirdly, direct attention to a disproportionate
research emphasis on cost management issues with a focal point of that of improving cost
performance given a certain strategy and cost structure, i.e. executional cost management, opposed
to research into the cost structural choices associated with the design of the value chain, i.e.
structural cost management (e.g. Anderson and Dekker, 2009ab). This is perhaps surprising, when
the centrality of the cost structural choices in relation to the competitive position is considered.
These scholars do, fourthly, stress the amble opportunity to understand the more ‘complex economic
and social forces’ (Anderson, 2007, p. 483) that govern the management of the structural costs.

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In CMS, debates on methodology have typically taken second stage to those on epistemology and ontology as the field embraced a plurality of methods. Recent work pushing for CMS to engage more strongly with mainstream theory, however, raises the need for a discussion on how to use methods recognizable to the mainstream in progressive ways. This paper seeks to remedy this lacunae by linking the concept of Critical Performativity (Spicer, Alvesson & Kärreman, 2009) to case study research and shows how case studies informed by Critical Realism (Easton, 2010a) can be generalized to “what could be” (Schofield, 2002). In this way, employing case studies in a progressive fashion may serve as a valuable means for a critically perfomative CMS to achieve greater impact through influence on mainstream theory building, business school education and management practice.

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The paper at hand presents an extension and application of Kotzab & Madlbergers (Kotzab &
Madlberger, 2001) original clicks-and-mortar web-scan framework, which is here used to reexamine
the click-and-mortar activities of the top 100 Danish retailers and compare with results
from the identical study last year. The first part of the paper describes the development and
rationale behind the model used, the second part describes the results obtained and describes the
evolution by analysing data from 2001, 2002 and 2003. The empirical results show a shift
toward selling in the internet channel, and a differentiation between the most sophisticated sites:
they focus on either Marketing or Logistics processes!

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Inspired by Latour’s (2005a) notion of matters of concern and M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III as a representation
of the Poincaré Disk, this study follows how an S&OP process was fabricated in a large Swedish
manufacturing company. The study claims that when actors are fabricating the S&OP process, local actors
create emergent, ongoing and multiple matters of concern around it. The group demand chain, the actor
who is responsible for guiding the implementation of the process, delegates the attempts to close these
matters of concern to local actors located in separate times and spaces. As a result, constituents of the
S&OP process are dispersed in diverse local times and spaces rather than being coordinated in a single time
and space by the group demand chain. Accounting is a set of matters of concern.
The S&OP process and its purpose of integration come from an “absolute nothingness” – its minimal
configuration ‐ because actors refer to them in their absences. They need to be re‐presented. The minimal
configuration of the S&OP process creates a working time/space where diverse actors are engaged to create
emergent properties of the S&OP process and new possibilities of integration. Consequently, as new matters
of concern are constantly created by actors, integration on the demand chain becomes uncertain because
actors are always creating new possibilities to move towards integration but will never arrive at the
destination of integration. The S&OP process and integration thus go back to the “absolute nothingness”
because as matters of concern they have no edge. To integrate is thus to postpone integration. In‐between
stands the constituents of the S&OP process and possibilities of integration dispersed in diverse times and
spaces. This means from this “absolute nothingness” lays the “geometry exactitude” of the managerial
technology. Accounting is a Poincaré Disk. Therefore accounting not only creates a presence what are
absent but also initiates a working time/space where actors can bring heterogeneous problematisation
upon itself. The impossibility of representation brings about possibility of heterogeneous
representational practices. Accounting makes the transition possible by artificially blurring the
distinction between absence and presence.

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The main finding of this thesis is that when actors are fabricating the S&OP process,
local actors create emergent, ongoing and multiple matters of concern around the S&OP
process. The group demand chain, the actor who is responsible for guiding the
implementation of the process, delegates the attempts to close these matters of concern to
local actors located in separate times and spaces. As a result, constituents of the S&OP
process are dispersed in diverse local times and spaces rather than being coordinated in a
single time and space by the group demand chain. When local actors are closing these
matters of concern, they create new properties on the S&OP process and new
management possibilities in relation to integration. These new management possibilities
may include, for instance, generating different primary keys of forecasting in different
divisions, mobilising different inscriptions in different settings, using mean error to
evaluate forecasting accuracy, connecting different visualisations such as ABC analysis
and items with high growth rate and value to collaborators’ intelligence, creating new
potentials for more consistent decision making and more proactive customer serving,
creating new actions to help the under-estimated sales forecast, and transforming the
minimal configurations of the S&OP process. Consequently, integration on the demand
chain becomes uncertain because actors are always creating new possibilities to move
towards integration but will never arrive at the destination of integration. To integrate is,
thus, to postpone integration because there are always emergent matters of concern
around the technology to foster integration. Because constituents of the S&OP process
are separated in diverse times and spaces, to integrate is also to separate constituents of
integration.

This paper discusses factors affecting the execution of supply chain management and
presents a conceptual model and six hypotheses based on such factors identified in the
literature. The model was tested in two European country-specific cases using structural
equation modelling. Findings in both cases confirm the hypothesized hierarchical order
of three proposed antecedents: ‘internal SCM conditions’ affect ‘joint SCM conditions’
which in turn influences collaborative ‘SCM-related processes’. Managerial
implications are that firms in both countries should adopt these hierarchical steps to
ensure a rigorous and appropriate approach to achieving full and integrative SCM.